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HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — NASCAR’s annual gathering of championship contenders for media availabilities ahead of the season finale has often turned into another sort of red-carpet rollout — for gamesmanship.
Given the hard-edged nature of this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs, such tactics could almost be expected. But Thursday from sunny south Florida, the witty barbs, acid-tongued goading and mind games stayed inside the cabanas.
Instead of sniping, a genuine sense of respect permeated the interactions of title contenders Kyle Busch, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick and Martin Truex Jr., with shared appreciation for their talents, their backstories and their road to Sunday’s NASCAR Championship Round race. Though playing nice worked well for Thursday’s preliminaries, all four indicated there might be limits to the diplomacy come crunch time in Sunday’s season-ending Ford EcoBoost 400 (3 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM) at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“I think there’s a lot of respect for where everybody is at,” said Harvick, the defending series champ, “and I think when you look at Martin and everything that those guys have done with what they’ve gotten in Colorado and here they are, and you look at Kyle breaking his leg and fighting back, and Jeff who’s going to retire and run the last race, there’s really no reason to create a story. There’s no reason to create a moment.”
The varied backgrounds make for a compelling title fight, even though the gloves were nowhere near to coming off Thursday at The Diplomat Resort and Spa. Instead, all four greeted media questions as relaxed but confident contenders with season-long laurels on the line.
Harvick’s reign and role as a pre-race favorite, Gordon’s swan song as one of the sport’s most important figures, Busch’s stunning return from severe leg injuries for his best title bid ever, and Truex’s underdog run with a single-car team from the Rockies — Thursday, they all blended together. The four share some common threads as stock-car racing veterans, but the experience levels with regards to competing for a crown in NASCAR’s top division are like darts on a map.
But former champs Gordon and Harvick didn’t take the needle to championship newcomers Busch and Truex, much like Tony Stewart did to Carl Edwards in the days before the 2011 finale or in the way that champion-in-waiting Harvick did to Joey Logano ahead of last year’s title march.
Chalk it up to a certain reverence.
“There is in here. I don’t know if there will be on Sunday. Things certainly change when you put that helmet on,” Truex said. “Honestly, I really think there is. All the stuff that we’ve done together so far for the Chase and going to do the late show with Jimmy Fallon, I think we do have a lot of mutual admiration. Certainly, how couldn’t you? … I think we all have a lot of respect for each other’s stories, how we got here, what we have on the line, and really, for the most part on the race track we respect each other as well. It’s still going to be a hell of a battle.”
The respect level among the championship quartet may run high, but the risks and rewards in the high-stakes season finale also peg the gauges. A handful of incidents in the nine previous races in this year’s Chase have raised scrutiny about on-track ethics and the unwritten rules of the code of honor — or lack thereof — among drivers.
Stewart, in his 2011 media day salvo with Edwards, famously said he’d wreck his own mother to win a championship. No one ventured that far into the thicket of driver conduct Thursday, but each expressed hopes for how the scenario might play out in their favor.
“I think you have to be in a competitive environment like we are. I think it also depends on your interaction with those drivers,” Gordon said. “I mean, I don’t think that any of us currently have any beefs among one another, and we have a lot of respect for one another, and you want to go out there — the ultimate is that you’re running second and you have to pass one of these guys on the final lap, and it’s some bold and exciting move but a clean move, maybe just a little fender rub or something like that, that gets you the win. To me that’s the ultimate. That’s how everybody wishes and hopes that they could do it.”